I'm just a fellow out standing in his field...
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Saturday, May 15, 2010

I plant 4.1 acres of corn and am frustrated

Yesterday I attempted to finish our 30 acres or so of unplanted ground. I needed to do around five acres of corn for the duck hunters and which we intend to combine as a test plot. Then plant three bags of soybeans as a test plot. Plant a few acres of barley. Plant 10 acres of Teff for hay. Figure out what to do with the other 10 acres that is full of poroso millet which will plug up the harrow if I disk it. The seed company wants swan oats in the worst way and would take a 10 acre planting. But, it needs to be certified and the field had triticale and barley in it. I do not want to plow as the ground is a little wet and I would loose the moisture and make golfball sized clods that would never go away. If I no-till I will also loose the moisture. It needs to go into corn.
I strip-tilled five acres Thursday. I had to borrow our strip-tiller back from the neighbor who needed it Friday. It needed to be gone over twice. But, I was in a hurry... By the time I got fertilizer, the planter, then I thought about putting some early sweet corn in, and I had to go to town for seed, and then I had to cash a check so I could make my drill payment, (not the drill cart-just the drill).... We were also trying to finish up spreading fertilizer. There was about 35 acres of grass that has finally dried out enough to get on. Part of it was fertilized earlier and it is not showing green yet, so we put a bit more on. We had to use the 2-155 as the spare M670 had a pto failure. So....
I didn't get to plant corn till 6 p.m. The wet ground had turned cloddy and the seed was not getting covered. The low seed alarm keeps going off on the rough ground. I was too cheap to buy 2 lbs of sweet corn seed at $20 a lb or Ambrosia so I just had a little bit of seed. The white air planter does not like to plant 1/2 lb of seed per row. I put seed into two outside rows and I thought this would give me 4 rows. I of course miss-judged when to turn around and ran out of seed. So, it will probably cross-polinated with the field corn. I also did not change plates so there are lots of skips and doubles. I did mark the rows by dribbling in some gaint sunflowers. Of course no one will actually remember that there is sweet corn there... And the rest of the 40 acre field will be a later variety of sweet corn so I guess it doesn't really matter.
The rest of the grain corn planting was pretty much a bust. I couldn't get the seed covered. The alarm kept going off. I ran out of fertilizer with 1 acre left...
I went home and we have visitors. My wife's sister and family are here to help "organize" the storage trailer. Another job I failed to do. They were watching Avatar at high volume. Someone attempted to make popcorn. Our convection oven/microwave shuts down if you make popcorn. It has done this for the past three years. Just the same, I guess you have to try it again! Hey, circuit breakers reset themselves right? So I went and took my shower. Came back to a dead microwave, but no popcorn in the microwave. If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. It was kind of funny. I opened the door and let if cool down, then I made my nachos and watched Avatar.
Lots of computer graphics, humans are kind of bad, special effects are great, machine guns can be taken out with really good bows and arrows, if we all work together it is wonderful, nature is better than tech, there was a minor crisis, a major crisis-with a questioning of identity, followed by the main charactors putting on a show then another huge car chase, some charactor growth, and an improbable conclusion and charactor growth and the important message to accept those who are different.
More incredible creativity from people who still can't get over being made fun of in high school.
I am trying to teach my daughter to understand the system. I had one small success last night.
She was sleeping on the couch as her aunt and cousin had her room. She thought she needed a pillow and tried to ask for one. She was completely missunderstood and much dialogue ensued with no attention paid to what she was trying to saw.
In the middle of it she came over to me and said that they really didn't know what she was trying to say but she was just going to let it go. She was laughing. She was just going to take care of it herself.

rule # 5: If you know you are right, do you have to explain it to everyone else?

Collieguy,I am trying to help my daughter develop coping mechanisms now rather than buying them from a shrink. I may end up with a pretty screwed up kid.Gorges, I suppose you saw that the comment showed up. Thanks for being supportive of new bloggers!